Isabelle Huppert as Anne with the lifeguard and the umbrella – two recurring features of ‘In Another Country’
I chose this screening based on Isabelle Huppert’s appearance and the vague recollection that the writer-director Hong Sang-Soo was important. I wonder what I might have written if I wasn’t aware of the director’s pedigree? I later realised that this was one of the films in competition for the Palme d’Or in 2012 and that Hong is a celebrated figure on the festival circuit. As I watched the film I had mixed feelings – but I kept watching.
This is a classic ‘festival film’, aiming to please very specific audiences. I would be surprised if Hong’s films get much distribution beyond festivals, but who knows? A low-budget offering, this features a total of seven actors, most of whom play roughly the same characters in three separate scenarios set in an attractive seaside location – little more than a few houses and a hotel/bar in a small bay with a beach. The scenarios are presented through the device of a young woman writing them out – as short stories I thought, but I later read that they were meant to be screenplay ideas. The writer works with her mother in a small hotel/B&B.
In each scenario Isabelle Huppert plays a Frenchwoman called Anne who stays in the B&B and who is first a film director, then a married woman meeting her lover and finally a woman who has just been divorced. Each scenario involves similar characters and settings – a walk to the shops, a stroll on the beach, an encounter with a lifeguard and an altercation with another Korean man involving accusations of infidelity. Huppert speaks English throughout and, since this is ostensibly a comedy, there are several interchanges between characters which depend on mis-communication. The serious discourse underpinning the encounters appears to be a satire on Korean men’s attraction to foreign women and the social consequences of the over-polite exchanges between men and women. I confess that the humour didn’t completely work for me – I could see that it was clever and it was at times amusing, but not laugh-out-loud funny. The repetition of similar jokes and the play around getting drunk on soju began to get tedious after a while.
Isabelle Huppert, who presumably met the director at Cannes (where he has been ‘in competition’ five times) relishes the opportunity to play against type, skittering along on heels or slouching in flats clutching a soju bottle. The overall look and feel of the film is certainly attractive but I was irritated by the abrupt camera zooms (a familiar trait in the director’s style it would appear) and I wanted more about cultural differences in adultery and small talk. I’m clearly not the ideal festival audience. Hong Sang-Soo has won many awards at festivals across the world since the 1990s so I’m probably missing something. Here’s a sequence from the film used as a trailer at Cannes:
A Korean soldier in a Russian uniform is captured by German troops in My Way
My Way has been promoted as the most expensive Korean blockbuster yet produced. It has had a handful of cinema screenings in the UK courtesy of the Terracotta Film Festival but it is released today on DVD by Universal in the UK. (Co)writer-director Kang Je-gyu was one of the principal figures in launching the concept of the Korean blockbuster with his earlier films, Swiri (Shiri, 1999) and Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo (Brotherhood 2004). The Korean concept of a blockbuster is slightly different to the Hollywood concept. The term tends to be used for any film that gets a wide release and which attracts a large number of admissions – i.e. the term refers more to distribution and exhibition than genre or narrative. All kinds of films have become blockbusters in South Korea, but often it is their appeal to aspects of Korean culture that is important.
Kang Je-gyu’s films have been blockbusters in both the Korean and the US sense. Shiri and Brotherhood both dealt with North-South conflicts in Korea, the latter with the 1950-53 Korean War and a story about brothers caught up reluctantly in the fighting. This spectacular war film attracted over 11 million admissions in South Korea (about a quarter of the population). My Way has a similar structure and theme as Brotherhood, but takes on an even bigger story that crosses Asia from Korea to the D-Day beaches of 1944. Kang was inspired by a reported historical event – the capture of a Korean soldier in a Wehrmacht uniform by American forces during the D-Day landings. Kang discovered the elements of the man’s story and then added another intriguing element of his own.
My Way begins and ends with a marathon runner during the 1948 London Olympics. The remainder of the 142 mins is a long flashback that begins in 1928 with two small boys racing each other. One is Kim Jun-shik and the other is Hasegawa Tatsuo, son of the Kim family’s Japanese colonial landlord. Tatsuo has his future mapped out as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. As a child he revels in the tussle with his Korean friend but ten years later he will face Jun-shik again in an ‘all-Japan’ trial. Jun-shik can’t be allowed to win and instead he is ‘pressed’ into the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuko (Manchuria). He becomes an unwilling participant (with other Korean pressed men) in the major battle with Soviet Russian forces on the Mongolian border in 1939 – where he again comes up against the now Colonel Hasegawa. Both men are captured by the Soviets and put in a Siberian work camp from where in 1941 they are pressed into the Red Army and after a battle with the Germans they escape westwards only to end up in a German work battalion on the Western Front. During this long trek they work through their personal antagonisms.
The emphasis in the film is on the epic battles fought in Manchuria/Mongolia and on the Eastern and Western European fronts. Kang Je-gyu uses CGI extensively and re-created his version of the D-Day landing at Utah beach in Latvia on a budget of $3 million. The cinema screening I saw was missing most of the subtitles because of a projection problem with the digital print. Since the film includes Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian and German dialogue this could have been a major problem. In reality, although I might have missed some of the nuances, I think that I could follow most of the film fairly easily. Certainly, I was not bored at any point through 142 minutes.
My Way is not an art movie. It’s a popular epic war movie with masses of CGI. It could be compared to Hollywood films like Pearl Harbor (which I haven’t seen) and that seems to be what most US critics have done, seeing it as just another bombastic mindless adventure movie. I think it is the Hollywood Reporter review that derides it as “blowing itself to bits”. I’m not going to claim that the film is an incisive analysis of war in the twentieth century, but I think that it deserves a little more consideration, at least as a project if not as a successful film narrative.
My first thought was that as a rare East Asian film that attempts to represent historical events in Europe, My Way offers a lesson for superior European critics. I felt myself about to scoff at an opening which pretends to be London, before I checked myself after realising that I have no idea what Seoul looked like in 1948 – just as I had little idea of the major battles fought between the Japanese and Russians over the Mongolian/Manchurian border in 1939. Kang has to be applauded for the ambition of his storytelling. He is also very brave to take on Japanese-Korean relationships in the 1930s and 1940s. The strategy for this big budget film was to use major stars from Japan, Korea and China to attract a Pan-Asian audience. Jang Dong-geon (who plays Jun-shik) and Odagiri Joe as Tatsuo have to carry the film. Fang Bingbing has a much smaller role as a Chinese sniper in Manchuria and other than Kim In-gwon as Jun-shik’s friend, pressed into the army at the same time, none of the other characters in the film are developed.
The strategy appears not to have worked in the sense that My Way attracted only around 2 million admissions in South Korea and a fraction of that number in Japan. I haven’t seen any figures for a Chinese release as yet. The Korean producers are looking at a significant loss with a worldwide box office take of only $16 million. On reflection, the loss of subtitles in the screening I attended probably didn’t help me understand the changing relationship between the Korean and Japanese characters and that relationship may be the stumbling block for audiences in both countries. I’m not sure what Chinese audiences might make of the film. The current animosity towards the Japanese won’t help but at least the film does offer an East Asian perspective on events in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, rather than Hollywood films, My Way resembles Chinese epic productions and I notice that the film’s release in Korea and Japan at the end of 2011 coincided with Zhang Yimou’s latest epic production Flowers of War (China/HK 2011) about the massacre in Nanjing in 1937 – not the best time to release a film about the Imperial Japanese Army, even if the focus is mainly on the Koreans forced to serve in it.
Since I’ve not seen the Hollywood CGI representations of World War 2 battles, I’m probably repeating a well-known observation, but I have to say that the depiction of the D-Day landings in My Way were almost surreal, especially in terms of the massed squadrons of bombers and American capital ships. I was reminded of anime like Graveyard of the Fireflies (Japan 1988) which includes the firebombing of Kobe by the Americans. Here’s an idea of how My Way looks in the US trailer:
This relatively unheralded film turned out to be the biggest box office local film of the year in South Korea, beaten only by Tom Cruise and the latest Transformers film in the chart. Perhaps most surprising about its success is that a large portion of the dialogue is spoken in a virtually extinct Manchu language – so the mainstream audience in Seoul were confronted with subtitles as well as several onscreen titles explaining aspects of the history. If this makes War of the Arrows sound like a dry historical document, fear not. This is a lean and sinewy action thriller.
Outline
Korea in the Joseon period, 1623. A teenage boy and his young sister flee from Seoul after a coup d’état in which their father is killed as a loyal officer of the ousted ruler. The boy Nam-yi has been given his father’s bow and instructed to look after his sister Ja-in. They are taken in by one of their father’s friends in the mountains. Thirteen years later Ja-in decides that she can’t always live in hiding and decides to marry the son of their protector. Nam-yi doesn’t think much of this idea but is forced to accept her decision and prepares to leave. He is by now a cynical man and we get hints of his archery prowess. It looks like he will become a bitter warrior, a kind of Korean version of a ronin in a Japanese samurai film. However, on the day of his sister’s wedding when he has just left town, Manchu cavalry arrive and swiftly take possession of the area. This is the ‘Second Manchu invasion of Joseon Korea’ in 1636. Half a million Koreans are captured and marched away to Manchuria. Nam-yi is now a fugitive looking for his sister and displaying prodigious archery skills in his battles with the invaders. Eventually he will find himself up against a crack squad of Manchu mounted archers who he must overcome to rescue Nam-yi and her new husband.
Commentary
A straightforward conventional action picture, this film demonstrates the strength of Korean Cinema in terms of acting, cinematography and overall presentation. Writer-director Kim Han-min previously directed two other genre films, both described as ‘thrillers’ on IMDB. War of the Arrows looks wonderful, the action sequences are exciting and there is a novelty (for me, at least) in the concentration on archery skills. I was very impressed by Park Hae-il as Nam-yi (having previously seen him in The Host). The actor does not resemble the usual action hero but he utilises all his skills to make the character convincing. The following excellent review on Koreanfilm.org says much more about the film from a more informed perspective. I agree with the comment that this is much more like a 1950s Hollywood Western in its focus on the characters and the hunt/chase than a conventional historical drama. I’m also interested in the comments about the choice of subject matter – the humiliating defeat of Korean forces during the Manchu invasion – and how this relates to the more typical choice of narratives that fit the ‘national popular’ categories (i.e. Korean War epics or films where the Japanese are the bad guys). The Koreanfilm.org review praises the film but criticises the ‘submission’ to the use of CGI and under current conventions of the action film. It suggests that more focus on the philosophy of the martial arts being practised in a Kurosawa Akira mode would have been a better bet. I’m not really in a position to comment on CGI but this alternative suggestion is one that I didn’t think of when watching the film, but on reflection it sounds an interesting idea.
I’d recommend this film to anyone interested in action films and East Asian Cinema more generally. Here’s the best trailer I could find (try to ignore the dreadful voiceover):
Seung-chul (Park Jung-bum, right) meets the dog who will become his companion.
The quality of films coming out of South Korea continues to be very high. When I read the festival’s blurb on this title I did wonder if it was really a good idea to watch it as the last film of three in an evening session. But around ten minutes in I’d forgotten about my reservations. Park Jung-bum is the writer, director and lead actor in a bleak tale about a North Korean defector (from Musan) trying to survive in Seoul. The film is over 2 hours long and it’s his first feature. But Park was previously an assistant on the much acclaimed Poetry and some of that film’s magic has certainly brushed off onto his own début.
Jeon Seung-chul finds himself sharing a small apartment literally on the edge of Seoul (there is a ‘demolished village’ next to the apartment) with a rather more ‘worldly-wise’ defector, Kyoung-chul, who has already settled into the capitalist culture of the South. Seung-chul struggles to earn a living fly-posting but is physically attacked by rivals, whereas Kyoung-chul has developed a lucrative racket in charging other defectors from the North large sums to send money home via his uncle in China. Seung-chul’s attempts to get a better job are thwarted by the giveaway of his North Korean identity which comes from the ’125′ code in his South Korean ID number. His only relief from the misery of work and the inhospitable apartment is his visits to a church where he develops an interest in an attractive young woman in the choir – who he doggedly follows across the city.
As my brief plot outline reveals, this is essentially a neo-realist idea with the two obvious references being Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. The former provides the hopelessness of the struggle for a proper job – often a process of one step forward and one step back. Like the old man in Umberto D, Seung-chul also seeks company from a dog – in this case a very appealing puppy. The neo-realist narrative idea is matched by a strictly functional camera style (shot on HD video). Any danger of sentimentality is avoided by making Seong-chul a very human figure, someone who is sullen and stubborn as well as honest and hardworking. I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot development so suffice to say, things go wrong for Kyoung-chul as well as Seung-chul and in the last third of the film there is more action and an important revelation about Seung-chul’s past in the North. Seung-chul eventually meets the woman at the church and for a moment I was worried that he was going to find ‘salvation’ as a church member. (I’ve no animosity towards organised religion as such, but the idea of ‘redemption’ in this scenario threatened to undermine everything that had gone before.) But this doesn’t happen and the woman proves to be as false and self-centred as most of the other characters that Seung-chul meets.
There is a very annoying programme on UK Radio 4 called ‘The Moral Maze’ in which moral questions are explored by a panel of ‘experts’. I’d like to sit them down in front of this film. Its humanism poses very difficult questions to which there are no easy answers. Seung-chul is not a ‘hero’ as such in the narrative. But it’s difficult not to feel for him and then to question yourself about how you might react if you met him. If you do manage to see the film, have a look at the various reviews and they will give you a flavour of what Park Jun-bum has stirred up in his representation of a character and a situation based, I think, on real events.
I hope the film gets a wide international release and I noted that its Korean backer is the same company, Fine Cut, which was involved in co-producing the Argentinian film Carancho. The character behind Fine Cut, Suh Young-joo has a long history in the South Korean industry and the new company is emerging as an interesting player in the international market for smaller independent films.
Mija (Yun Jung-hee) follows the instructions of her poetry teacher to really 'see' an apple. (Image courtesy Kino International)
Once again, the UK gets a prizewinner from Cannes after a long wait – Poetry won the 2010 Script Prize. It was well worth the wait, so thanks go to distributor Arrow. We caught it in the comfortable surroundings of Chapter Arts in Cardiff. Poetry was written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, a novelist and scriptwriter/director who in 2003-4 acted as Minister for Culture and Tourism in South Korea. This long film (139 mins) is thoroughly absorbing and undoubtedly one of the major releases of the year – especially as it comes from what I presume is a small independent Korean operation.
Plot outline (no spoilers)
Mija is 66 but still looking after her teenage grandson Wook in a semi-rural district outside Seoul. The boy’s mother is attempting to find work in South Korea’s second city, Busan (some 300km away). When Mija visits a doctor for a minor ailment he thinks that she has early onset Alzheimer’s and refers her to a Seoul hospital. But she then discovers that Wook is involved in a serious incident through his membership of a group of schoolfriends. The parents of the other boys want to pay to hush up the scandal. Mija has no money and gets by through her pension and part-time earnings looking after an elderly shop-owner who has suffered a stroke. Feeling hemmed in by her problems Mija seeks release through a new interest in poetry after enrolling in a local class and she takes her teacher’s words to heart. He asks all class members to try to write one poem by the end of the course and Mija is determined to do so.
Commentary
I’m a big fan of Korean Cinema though I’ve seen fewer Korean films in the last few years as the ‘Korean Wave’ has receded a little in terms of international distribution. The opening of Poetry seems very familiar with children playing by the river and a stunning mountain landscape. I was reminded of Memories of Murder (2003), a different kind of film but sharing some elements. Lee Chang-dong, in the press notes (available here), has said that the idea for the film came to him when he was watching television in a Japanese hotel room – one of those late night programmes when beautiful images of landscapes and soothing music are supposed to help you go to sleep. His idea was to explore the need to write poetry as a response to desperation.
Mija is played by Yun Jung-hee who was a famous Korean film actor of the 1960s to 1990s but who hasn’t appeared in a film since 1994. Her presence will certainly mean something to older Korean audiences. As Mija, Yun is presented as slightly eccentric in floral outfits with her hat and precise ways. Although her situation is quite desperate she maintains an outward appearance of calm and beauty – in contrast to her monosyllabic and slobbish grandson.
It should be clear from the outline above that this is a potentially rich and rewarding story – although I haven’t perhaps ‘sold’ it thoroughly because I don’t want to spoil the narrative pleasure. The film was released a few weeks ago in the US and it has already provoked a fair amount of comment, especially in terms of what is taken to be the resolution of the narrative. Lee Chang-dong has admitted that he intended the film to be ‘open’:
“Like a page with a poem on it, I thought of a film with a lot of empty space. This empty space can be filled in by the audience. In this sense, you can say this is an ‘open’ film.” (from the Press Notes)
If Lee is inviting us to ‘fill the blanks’ there are several different ways in which we can do this. The screening at Chapter was part of a project called ‘Cardiff sciSCREEN’ in which various local academics contribute responses to a discussion about the film which is then open to audience involvement. If you want to know more about this, there is an interesting website here (which includes a useful Korean view of the film). I think that this is a great idea but I wasn’t able to stay for the discussion and I’m rather more concerned to discuss the film ‘as film’ rather than to engage in the wider debates about dementia and poetry. I’d like to emphasise as well that the film is rewarding for audiences without a specific interest in dementia or poetry. In fact, the narrative for me seemed to raise dementia as an issue but then let it subside from prominence in the narrative – Mija is in the very early stages of forgetting simple words but she copes well when she can’t remember a word. We, of course, feel for her at these points but she is driven by concerns that are more immediate.
What then should we say about the film narrative? At one level the film focuses on the ways in which Mija has been isolated as a woman within Korean society. When we see her in different situations we see her struggling to ‘speak’ (i.e. both literally and metaphorically) when she is in ‘male’ spaces (though, as we’ve noted, she’s determined and does get there). From what we learn of her past, she has suffered from neglect and perhaps abuse by men and her relationships have been with women. Her family is now an absent daughter and an unhelpful grandson. The younger women that she meets are seemingly more confident and less troubled about ‘isolation’ – but it is clear that the problem hasn’t gone away.
One of the features of the Korean films that I have seen is often the way in which seemingly straightforward genre films also deal with important social and political issues. Poetry is in some ways a conventionally ‘realist’ social drama and its social commentary is quite subtle. Mija would have been born in 1943/4 – before the end of the Japanese control of Korea – and most of her life has been lived before the accelerated growth of South Korean economy and contemporary culture since the 1980s. I think that this is evident in her encounters with the men in the film. She has the utmost respect for her poetry teacher (who seems a lovely man with unlimited patience – although he is saddened by what he sees as the decline of poetry) but she at first mistrusts the policeman who belongs to a poetry group because his behaviour is boorish and bawdy. But she is told that he has been sent to the sticks from Central Seoul because he exposed corruption. He’s really one of the good guys whereas the smooth-talking men who are the fathers of Wook’s schoolfriends are representative of the new culture. It’s worth trying to think through this critique of Korean culture as you try to puzzle out why Mija behaves in the ways she does. The visual style of the film is also subtle. Mija is sometimes shown in extreme long shot in relation to the river and the mountains and she travels everywhere by bus (I hadn’t noticed before that Korean bus drivers follow the Japanese model and wear white gloves). In the landscape and on the bus she is again ‘isolated’ – i.e. there is space around her. This is a contrast to her ‘hemmed in’ isolation in her meetings with men but I’m not sure that I’ve figured this use of space out yet.
There is quite a lot of poetry in the film – several short pieces are ‘performed’ in class and at social readings. I’ve heard several people say that the film narrative itself is like a poem, but I confess I don’t know what they mean by this – enlighten me, please! Anyway, you should go and see this. It would make an interesting (but very long!) double bill with Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009) which has many similar plot elements but a completely different approach. I read in a Senses of Cinema essay that cinema audiences in South Korea are primarily made up of women – young women I assume. If this is true it would be interesting to know what they made of the film. Its box office run in South Korea was interesting, opening on 192 screens for a No. 7 slot but a screen average below $1,000. It then improved in weeks 2 and 3 – a sure sign of good word of mouth – before dropping out of the Top Ten after four weeks with a gross of $1.08 million. So far it has done pretty well in the US and I hope the word of mouth builds here too.
The Saw franchise meets the (bonkers) South Korean sensibility of Memories of Murder (2003)? I wouldn’t want to deal with the police in South Korea (actually, I wouldn’t want to deal with the police in this country given the violence they are meting out, and inspiring, at demos) if these films are any indication of their corruptness and ineptitude. Memories, based on a real case, is, at least, set in the sticks, and there’s the town v. country copper trope at work. So it made sense that they didn’t know what they were doing (in terms of representation not reality). However, this serial killer movie is set in Seoul and follows a flawed ex-cop who’s trying to find out why his prostitutes are disappearing.
There’s a wonderful surreality that seems to run through South Korean cinema, though I have no idea if this is simply the films I’ve seen or an expression of Korean culture. When this is combined with Saw-like environs and cruelty, there’s bound to be a discomforting mix on the screen. Absolutely gripping too, even though this debut feature of Hong-jin Na is too long. A Hollywood remake is in the offing though there’s absolutely no way that the ending won’t be changed!
Film festivals are essential in the process of increasing diversity in the range of films released globally. We like to support as many of these festivals as possible and the 20th Annual ‘Films From the South’ Festival is currently running in Oslo until October 17. A highlight of the festival is a programme of screenings of all the 12 films restored by the World Cinema Foundation. On October 10 there is a gala screening of one of the restored films, Mário Peixoto’s Limite (Brazil 1931), with new music from the Norwegian composer/musician, Bugge Wesseltoft. This prestigious event will be held at the home of Norwegian National Opera and Ballet. (Details of the event here.)
“The World Cinema Foundation (WCF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and restoring neglected films from around the world – in particular, those countries lacking the financial and technical ability to do so.
Established by Martin Scorsese, the Foundation supports and encourages preservation efforts to save the worldwide patrimony of films, ensuring that they are preserved, seen and shared. Its goal is to defend the body and spirit of cinema in the belief that preserving works of the past can encourage future generations to treat film as a universal form of expression.” (from the WCF Mission Statement)
Since 2007, the WCF has restored the following films (some of which have been reviewed on this blog):
Redes (Mexico/1936) by Fred Zinnemann, Emilio Gómez Muriel Revenge (Mest, USSR/Kazakhstan 1989) by Ermek Shinarbaev Two Girls on the Street (Két lány az utcán, Hungary/1939) by André De Toth A River Called Titas(Titas Ekti Nadir Naam, India-Bangladesh/1973) by Ritwik Ghatak The Eloquent Peasant (Shakavi el Flash el Fasi, Egypt/1969) by Shadi Abdel Salam A Brighter Summer Day (Taiwan/1991) by Edward Yang The Night of Counting the Years (Al Momia, Egypt/1969) by Shadi Abdel Salam Dry Summer (Susuz yaz, Turkey/1964) by Metin Erksan Touki Bouki (Senegal/1973) by Djibril Diop Mambéty The Housemaid (Hanyo, South Korea/1960) by Kim Ki-Young Forest of the Hanged (to be completed) (Romania/1965) by Liviu Ciulei Trances (Trances/El Hal, Morocco/1981) by Ahmed El Maanouni
'Egyptian Maidens'
The Films From the South programme offers many more delights (download programme). The programme looks very strong on the recent output from South Korea and Mexico and also on Asia and Latin America generally. African films are clearly still difficult to get hold of but there are a few here and I’m certainly intrigued by writer-director Mohamed Amin’s Bentein Men Masr (Egyptian Maidens, Egypt 2010) by described as “an Egyptian version of Sex and the City”.
There is another welcome appearance for Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie (A Screaming Man) (2010, Chad/France and Belgium) but just as Haroun needs French funding, some of the other ‘African films’ are also made by filmmakers operating out of wealthier countries. It would be good to see more indigenous production but every chance to put Africa on screen through co-production is worth exploring and here there is a new Tom Tykwer film Soul Boy (2010) made as a co-production with Kenya and co-directed by local filmmaker Hawa Essuman. Stolen (Australia/Morocco 2009) is a documentary feature that has provoked strong feelings. Australian filmmakers Daniel Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala (from Bolivia) travelled to a refugee camp run by the Polisario, the liberation group fighting for the independence of the Saharawi peoples of the Western Sahara. The filmmakers accompanied a refugee returning to visit her mother still in a camp on a trip sponsored by the UN. On the trip they claim to have discovered evidence of the slavery of Black Saharawis in the camps (see the film’s website). The Polisario have reacted with counter-claims in the Australian media as the film is screened at international festivals. Stolen has a Facebook page (briefly taken down but now re-instated). Stolen is screened in a strong documentary strand that includes an appearance by Kim Longinotto, the UK documentarist who has specialised in films about women’s struggles in many parts of the world and the festival is screening her latest doc Pink Saris (UK 2010) as well as 2008′s Rough Aunties. (We hope to feature a London Film Festival report on Pink Saris.)
There are many more interesting films at the Films From the South Festival and after investigating this year’s programme, we’ll certainly be considering how to get to Oslo in the future.
Mother is something of a puzzle. I’m a huge fan of Bong Joon-ho’s previous films, Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2006), but I knew enough not to expect the same again. In the event, Mother seems closest to Memories of Murder – but there are significant differences. Perhaps the most important difference re both the earlier films is that they explored their generic mixes in the context of recognisable social/political issues which attracted large local audiences as well as discerning overseas fans. Mother too has been very popular locally, but so far I haven’t found any explanation of connections to specific local social/political issues.
Plot outline (no spoilers)
In a small town, Do-joon is a young man in his twenties still living with his mother. He has learning difficulties in the form of problems with his short-term memory and is easily manipulated by his friend Jin-Tae. After an initial incident when Do-joon is the victim of a hit-and-run incident, the narrative fully kicks into gear when he is arrested for the murder of a young girl. His mother, who runs a shop selling herbal remedies and an unlicensed acupuncture service, immediately springs to his defence. Her son is imprisoned and the authorities and the legal counsel she hires seem fairly disinterested in pursuing any detailed investigation. Do-joon is held on circumstantial evidence and his mother is on her own, at least initially. Will she find the real murderer?
Commentary
We shouldn’t be surprised that, as a major South Korean box-office film, Mother looks terrific with stunning camerawork, great performances and a fine music score (from Lee Byung-woo) and sound design. Several familiar elements are in place – a jaundiced view of the local cops, a character with learning difficulties, an almost Kurosawa-like obsession with extreme weather and a detailed view of small town life. As one of the lawyers says, “the fee we are charging wouldn’t cover an incident over two broken teeth in Seoul”. (In fact a tooth does get knocked out later on.)
So, are we being suckered into an art cinema/genre play – or is there more to it? The genre appears to be the Hitchcockian thriller, possibly the ‘wrong man’ scenario. If the mother had been a young woman it might have been a romance thriller. American critics such as Roger Ebert appear to accept it as a refreshing Hitchcock thriller that doesn’t do what is expected – and despite (or perhaps because of) its length (129 minutes) and leisurely pacing, leaves several questions still not answered.
The confirmation of what I suspected comes from Bong’s own statement in the Press Pack. His focus is on the mother-son relationship and what happens if a mother who will do anything for her son is placed in the position of the disinterested investigator that we usually get in these kinds of films. In casting Kim Hye-ja, a veteran Korean TV actor best-known to millions of Korean’s as a character in a long-running series The Rustic Diary (1980-2002), Bong ensured that his Korean audience would be immediately drawn to the character speculating how far she would go. Kim began her career in 1963 and Bong clearly saw that although she might appear to be fragile, she has inner strength and enormous psychological strength. Added to her performance, Bong’s meticulous attention to detail in the setting explains the popularity of a film that in the West is deemed ‘arthouse’. The son is played by Won Bin, who starred in a previous Korean blockbuster, Taegukgi (Brotherhood, 2004) and is described as an attractive ‘every mother’s son’. One of the female characters says that he has the most beautiful eyes – “like a deer’s”.
Trevor Johnson’s review in Sight and Sound (September 2009) is perceptive in recognising that the central performances are situated in a narrative in which South Korea comes across as a worryingly dysfunctional society with men who are complacent, incompetent or brutal and women who have had to find ways to cope. The mother’s situation (the absence of the father is never explained) creates issues for her investigation in terms of what she has done in the past and what she is prepared to do now. The final scenes are important and worth reflecting on. (The only flaw in the film’s construction that I could see is that she suddenly seems to have money at a crucial juncture – but perhaps I missed something?)
So, I think that the puzzle is solved. Bong is a genuine auteur of popular cinema, a highly skilled craftsman with a good sense of how to engage his Korean audience with intelligent films that fruitfully explore generic pleasures in the service of understanding human relationships in societal contexts. I won’t forget Kim Hye-ja’s performance and what it stands for.
